Conventional mobile telecommunications devices, such as telephone handsets, have been designed primarily for speech calls and have only a limited capability for handling data. For example, in GSM, a short message service (SMS) has been provided to permit the user to send and receive short text messages that can be transmitted through a cellular public land mobile network (PLMN). More recently, recommendations have been implemented to provide a wireless application protocol (WAP) to promote common standards and specifications for data services that operate over wireless communication networks. WAP-enabled telephone handsets have been developed which allow the user to access remote servers. Data content is provided in a markup language, similar to conventional hypertext markup language (HTML), known as wireless markup language (WML), which is configured to allow data to be displayed as a deck of individual cards which are of a size suited for display on the relatively small display screen usually available on a mobile device such as a cellular telephone handset or PDA.
The mobile device runs a browser, commonly referred to as a microbrowser, to display data from a content server. The browser acts as a client which communicates with the content server via a WAP proxy server or gateway. The primary job of the proxy server is to translate between the WAP protocols used by the browser and the Internet protocols such as http (hypertext transfer protocol) used to communicate with the content server. Navigation between different decks and their respective cards is controlled by the user with keys on the mobile device. Typically, the mobile device has a smaller number of keys than a conventional personal computer and does not have a mouse, so that navigating with the browser of the mobile device can be difficult for the user. In particular, each key on a mobile handset is typically associated with a group of three or more letters of the alphabet, so that a particular letter is chosen by pressing keys a number of times in quick succession. This is by no means a straightforward method of entering long strings of letters, such as those making up a WAP address.
When a WAP enabled mobile telecommunications device is first connected for use with a mobile network, initialisation data to enable the device to connect to the server is supplied to the mobile device through the mobile network, in the form of a data message. For example, the initial data is transmitted in a so-called WAP push, which is a feature of the WAP protocol used for sending unsolicited information from the server to the client.
The push with the initialisation information can be sent as a short message service (SMS) message or as a GSM unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) message. In this way, the mobile device is provided with a number of pre-set server addresses, which can be selected by the user to provide access to information services, commercial organisations and the Internet in general. By providing the settings initially as a push to the handset, the number of keystrokes that need to be performed on the device to access a server are reduced significantly, which simplifies operation for the user.
A user browsing the Internet via a conventional web browser will come across sites which claim to be WAP-enabled. The user may wish to view those sites via his WAP telephone, but can only do so by entering the URL of the site, commonly referred to as a bookmark, into the WAP browser. However, due to the limited user interface described above, it is very difficult to enter bookmarks into the WAP browser.
One of the aims of the present invention is to address this problem.